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Welcome to The Health & Wellness Practitioners Podcast! Dr. Danielle and other guest experts talk about everything from getting your practice started, developing your clinical skills, growing your practice YOUR way, and dealing with the real stuff life burnout and work/life balance. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you’ll find something here for you!
DR. DANIELLE: Hello, everyone. I'm super, super excited to bring to you today, Jennifer Mercier. She's going to share who she is and what she does, and then we're just going to dive into all kinds of things from there.
DR. JENNIFER: Hello, Dr. Danielle, I'm Dr. Jennifer Mercier. I'm a naturopath, midwife, massage therapist; been in practice this year in 2021 for 21 years. So it's kind of a special year for me. Especially coming out of 2020, 2021 is way welcomed. I've been in women's healthcare practice since 1996 and started out as a massage therapist and then delved much deeper into women's health by becoming a doula, and then just eventually figured out I needed to monitor and manage the whole labor and delivery and became a midwife. And while I was in my midwifery practice, I went to a dual ND PhD program, and became a naturopath and researcher. So I've to date published two research abstracts, internationally and domestically on the deep visceral manipulation work that I do, which is Mercier Therapy. I've traveled the world, Mercier Therapy is in 17 different countries. I'm leaving for Dubrovnik, Croatia next week to teach a class there. Very, very exciting. And God has blessed me exponentially with this work in delivering it to women who really, really need it. So that's who I am in a nutshell.
DR. DANIELLE: Well, as you describe all of your credentials, I'm like, whoa, that's a lot of education. That's a lot of training. I often see people get all those extra credentials because they feel like they're not enough with just what they know already. But knowing a little bit about your path and what you've created in the world, it feels like all those were very necessary to kind of blend together and become Mercier Therapy.
DR. JENNIFER: I agree. We don't need all those credentials and I love what you said about needing a credential to further move you forward, and maybe not feeling like you're enough, and I think most of us have a certain part of us that feel that way. And I've always felt that way. So isn't that interesting that you would say that right off the bat? I absolutely honor that you said that, that's super cool. But I always felt like the PhD wasn't absolutely necessary, but I felt like it gave me a bit of a leg up if I ever wanted to write some research that it could give me some credibility in that place. Has it? I don't know, but I'm published. So my hard work has paid off, and even though they're not like double blind placebo studies, there's still studies of women that I've worked with in clinical practice. So it's data sharing and I'm okay with that.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. And there's probably not a whole lot of research that's similar to what you have published available in the published research.
DR. JENNIFER: Correct, there are very nicely written research abstracts that expand on site specific therapy certainly. There are several of them actually, not in a robust sort of way, but there are several things written that are of good information. And I just wanted to contribute to that from a sequence that I wrote and be able to validate my work. And I think I've been able to do that pretty well. So back in 2014 when I was in Dubai and I presented my first abstract at the World Congress of Low Back and Pelvic Pain, and I was sitting next to a professor from the New England School of Osteopathic Medicine. And he was asking me, why haven't I seen more of this? And I guess, as an osteopath, he probably had a little more interest than other allopathic professionals. And I said, well, I just am not sure. You know, my reach is only so far. I'm everything that I possibly can to get the information out there. But I'm really glad that you say that because it's important work to me that I use my hands and I use my brain to think about the space inside of the body and how the organs are layered, and how we could benefit manipulating them with our hands. It's just so powerful.
MERCIER THERAPY ORIGIN AND APPLICATION
DR. DANIELLE: So can you describe for someone that's unfamiliar, what Mercier Therapy is?
DR. JENNIFER: Certainly. Mercier Therapy is a deep visceral pelvic organ manipulation. So I'm literally going in with my hands layer by layer via the abdomen. So there's no vaginal work, it's non-invasive, going in via the abdomen from the dermis, the adipose, the fascial profundus down to the musculature, melting all of those tissues enough so that I can get down to the uterus and the ovaries, the bladder, all of the surrounding structures to manipulate them with my hands. What I'm doing is pushing the uterus anterior, posterior, media later, literally exercising the ligamentous structure of the pelvis to allow for freer and more mobile pelvic organs, which enables and restores positive blood flow. So that's what I do. It's literally a wake up call on the female pelvic organs, and yes, we do use it for men as well, however, we have not published anything nor do we make any claims to help any specific male issues. But from both male and female, we seem to find some very positive effects.
DR. DANIELLE: I could make assumptions about this, but to not assume, and for someone that maybe doesn't know, who would Mercier Therapy be for? What are the indications for Mercier Therapy?
DR. JENNIFER: Mercier Therapy indications would be any pelvic pathology present. So endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, women that have fibroids or have had past pelvic surgeries, in which we want to address the scar tissue, women that have had any sexual trauma, pregnancy loss, any sort of trauma that would fall under trauma - pregnancy loss, painful menstrual cycles, pregnancy termination, still birth women that have had second trimester miscarriages or pregnancy losses - really any woman is a great candidate for Mercier Therapy. The only time we don't work is during pregnancy, we don't work if there's an IUD or tubal clips or ESHRE device in the uterine horns, we just don't want to displace anything or make anything potentially an issue, right? So we're very careful to not work with that population, but pretty much any woman is a great candidate for our work.
DEVELOPING NEW THERAPY AND SHARING WITH PRACTITIONERS
DR. DANIELLE: One of the reasons that I wanted to interview you and have this interview on the podcast is because I wanted to hear more about how Mercier Therapy developed and how you not only developed this therapy, this approach clinically, but then also decided you're going to take this and teach other practitioners how to do this work.
DR. JENNIFER: Mercier Therapy was literally born out of a necessity for my own use. I was diagnosed with stage four endometriosis at 26, and I had a series of endometriomas start leaking fluid into my pelvis. And the pain was so intense. I was on oral contraceptives, which caused a myriad of side effects that were unwanted, severe headaches. And I was in college when all of that early stuff was going down. So it was pretty rough to be in college and to have all of these symptoms of endometriosis and then side effects from the oral contraceptive. So I literally started poking around on my tummy one night after my second laparoscopy and refusing Lupron suppressive therapy, which then shuts you off completely, puts your temp temporary state of menopause, I started poking around on my belly just to find some super, super tender spots. I mean spots that were like a level ten pain, spots that if you were poking around on your tummy or anywhere in your body, you'd probably back off, but I just kept going. I just kept working through that pain because I felt like, gosh, I got to do something here.
So I kept working, kept working, night after night, I worked on myself and I then started to come up with a sequence in my brain, like, okay, I'm going to push the uterus this way and I'm going to hold the ovary, and I'm going to give the two a nice stretch away from each other. And it just became like a nightly routine. And so with my next menstrual cycle, after having worked on myself like that very diligently, I had no warning of my menstrual cycle coming, and that was very unusual. I usually would have spotting. I usually would have immense cramps in my pelvis, and none of that happened and I thought, okay, something amazing has happened here.
And so I then started thinking about what a sequence would look like and how can we address the entire pelvis. And so I just started writing, I started writing and I thought, I got to get this out to the masses because something is amazing. Something is happening here.
So that's when I started writing the curriculum manual and I thought, oh my gosh, this is quite good. I think I could apply to be a CE provider. And I did just that. And the NCBTMB the National Certification Accrediting Body for Therapeutic Massage and Body Work, accepted the curriculum, and I was able to offer CEs and I thought, okay, this is great. So now I'm credible. And why don't I just teach this?
So I did my first certification training class in 2006, and I've been going strong ever since. And as I said in the very beginning, we're in 17 different countries. And it makes me so happy and humbled and honored to A) be in all of those different countries, but B) to have those people seek out my assistants in teaching them. My therapy is an incredible, incredible humbling honor. And I'm so grateful for all of those professionals that make their way to my class every year.
DR. DANIELLE: So thinking back to what the timeline would be like, it sounds like you were earning your credentials, your additional training and education while you were also developing and growing Mercier Therapy. They were kind of growing synchronistically.
DR. JENNIFER: Yeah. That's exactly what was happening. By the time I got to naturopathic school, I had it pretty much buttoned up and I was still working on myself. However, I was still thinking that, okay, I'll teach this at some point, but I had to finish my thesis first. So I finished that up and then I actively started thinking about teaching, how would I go about that? What kind of equipment would I need to do that? And then again, getting the CE approval so that I could have the credibility. Why would people want to come train with me if they couldn't earn CEs as well. But yeah, all of that was in motion in my mid twenties, early thirties, and here I'm 47 now, and it's just been an awesome journey.
FIND OUT IF MERCIER THERAPY IS RIGHT FOR YOUR PRACTICE
DR. DANIELLE: So obviously me being a chiropractor, I know plenty of chiropractors who have learned Mercier Therapy, what other kinds of practitioners can learn Mercier Therapy, and then also apply it clinically?
DR. JENNIFER: Sure. So I like to say at least have a license to put your hands on people. So massage therapists, naturopath, chiropractors, physiotherapists, which is what their physical therapists in Canada and Europe - who else do I train? I've trained doulas and they're non-licensed providers, but this is body work. It's not massage. So doulas, childbirth educators, physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, I have a nice myriad of different professionals that come to train with me. One MD who's actually a midwife in Tennessee, came to train with me and him and I ended up both training at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee with The Farm Midwives at some point. So I trained with Ina May and Pamela Hunt and Deborah Flowers and Joanne Santana in The Farm in 2001. And it was a wonderful experience, but Mark Sherfey, he's an MD and he's a CPM, him and I both trained over at The Farm. And then he came and trained with me and it was the neatest thing to have him in my class.
OVERCOMING CESAREAN AND BIRTH STORY SHAME
DR. DANIELLE: I've probably never shared this on the podcast before, but when I was pregnant with my second daughter, she was my third pregnancy, I had had a cesarean with my first delivery and I didn't want to have a cesarean with my second one. And probably about two or three weeks before my due date, I was like, I'm going to go to the farm. I'm just going to leave. Take my daughter with me and I'm going to go to the farm. I'm just going to show up there. It's like, I am probably too far along now for them to accept me as a patient. But if I just show up, what are they going to do? But I didn't do it, it would've really been disruptive for my marriage. So I was like, I'll stay. And then I also had another cesarean and a third one after that.
DR. JENNIFER: Well, I'm a midwife. I ended up with two C-sections myself. First baby was breach at 40 weeks and two days, and she was not moving. We tried, we tried, we tried - so cesarean for her. And then I tried to V back with my son and I was 41 at the time. And they were handling me like the geriatric pregnancy that they thought I was. And I was actually very, very healthy. My water ruptured at 38 weeks all on its own. And I was planning for a hospital V back which I labored in the hospital for 16 hours and with a ruptured bag. And I got to about four centimeters and I could feel the endometriosis pain in my abdomen and pelvis more than the contractions were bugging me. So not for lack of trying, but my friend who was my OB at the time, I said, I think you just need to take them. And he did. And I'm glad that he did. And kind of my spidey midwife sense said it's probably time. He was really high, he had a double nuchal cord and it was a short cord. So I don't think he was coming down, but anyway, two great healthy babes and did the work on myself, for the C-section recovery plan. And it's just been great.
DR. DANIELLE: This is such an important thing to talk about because those of us that work in holistic professions, especially those that work in holistic professions that support pregnant people. We're so hard on ourselves when birth doesn't go the way that we think that it should go, which is typically like we had a four hour labor and delivery at home, then there's so much guilt that comes after that for so many people. And I was one of those people after my first cesarean especially, I was just devastated and I felt like such a tremendously huge failure. And I can look back on that now and see that I really didn't have to feel that way, but that's just where I was at the time. But I like to have these conversations because I just really like to let people know that you never know how it's going to go. You can do everything right. Everything that you think that you're supposed to do. And your birth may not go the way that you wanted it to go.
DR. JENNIFER: And to your point, I always used to tell my moms when I was working as a midwife, you can't plan a mystery. Just let it be what it's going to be, just let it unfold. So I'd have moms and as sweet as they were, and still are friends of mine and today, I mean, these kids, some of them are teenagers now, which is absurd because I haven't aged one minute. So I have no idea how that happened, but they would write out this big elaborate birth plan, and then I'd say, you know what? That is awesome. I see what you've written. I understand that these are your wishes. If it doesn't go this way exactly, just know that I tried my very best to honor that for you, but we'll just have to wait and see, but don't plan a mystery. And so even if they'd had like seven babies before the next one could be completely different. Don't be hard on yourself would be my advice to you and to any other woman listening, because here's me, I even ended up with two C-sections and it's okay. It's okay.
DR. DANIELLE: It really is. And, you know, I learned so much from those experiences. I learned so much about myself. I learned so much about just labor and birth in general that I wouldn't have learned if things had just gone easy peasy the way that I had thought that they were going to.
DR. JENNIFER: That's a healthy perspective.
THE NATURE OF TEACHING OTHERS YOUR TECHNIQUES
DR. DANIELLE: Okay. So I want to dig in a little bit further with you into - I see a lot of women who have the potential to be teaching others. They've developed this amazing thing that they do that truly is special and they could be sharing it with other people and they don't, and there's a variety of reasons why. One of them is because they're so busy in their clinical practice that they can't fathom how they would make time to go out and teach what they do to other people. Another reason that often is the fear that someone else is going to steal their work. So I guess we kind of open this conversation up with you and see, have you experienced those things and how did you work through them?
DR. JENNIFER: Yeah. So the fear is real - getting up in front of a group of people, not thinking you're good enough to teach your craft. And that's definitely a huge probably component for many, many women that want to start educating. But I would encourage you to just go for it and do it. And your students will give you feedback. They'll let you know, Hey, this was good, or maybe you could change this or have you thought about this kind of thing? I'm sorry, Danielle, ask me one more time about the rest of your question.
DR. DANIELLE: Basically, if you ever felt what we would call imposter syndrome. And just how you work through how you manage the fear that you may have felt about someone copying your work or wanting to pass it off as their own. That's a risk that you take at any time when you teach what it is that you do.
DR. JENNIFER: Yes. So to your question about somebody taking my work and bringing it elsewhere and teaching it, putting their name on it and teaching it as their own, I do the little things that I can in class. I have my students sign something saying that they're not going to take any part of my manual and reproduce it. They're not going to take any part of my work and reproduce it or teach it to anyone else. I have had professionals ask me questions about, Hey, if I send my massage therapist to take your class, can that person then come back and teach me and then everyone else in the office how to implement it? And my answer is no. We don't want to water down the technique.
I'm certainly like a hawk in class watching everybody to make sure they've got it before they leave me. I don't know if there's anything more irritating about taking a class than leaving and not knowing what you learned and having trouble implementing it into your practice. I watch them like a hawk. I want to make sure every question is answered and they are comfortable putting the sequence into motion. So that's one thing - no, you can't teach my work unless you come and take my training, but also there are other entities out there that actually I've been accused of taking someone else's work, and that's been disproven time and time again, and unfortunately ended with a cease and desist letter. But this one particular entity, they said you took our training and now you're teaching and I'm like, Nope, I've never been to your training. I've been to one of your providers because I want to try all the therapies out there before so I can speak intelligently to it and say, well, this is what I experienced. It's not the same as what we offer here at Mercier Therapy.
I've also had some very high level teachers from other entities or institutions come and take my courses. And I ask them genuinely at the end of my class, Be as transparent as possible. Tell me how this is different than what you're teaching or what kind of training you've been through. Trust me, it's never apples to apples. It's always very, very different in its approach. And I honor that; however somebody wants to train, they should do it. If they want to do all the trainings, you should do it, but don't do them all and then make up your own thing. Keep the work true. And if I ever call for data and I ask you, Hey, you know, what kind of cases do you have? What do you want to contribute here to this, this abstract you could be published? It has to be my work and my work only. It can't be this kind of work along with a full body massage and acupuncture and these different supplements. And it's just got to be pure and simple, the work. That's what it's got to be. So as much as it's the honor system, Danielle, sometimes you end up inevitably with a phone call or an email from someone that says, Yeah, I don't think that this felt quite right to me. Can you confirm? And sure, absolutely I can.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. I think my takeaway is that you can make a choice to hold back and not share your work with others out of the fear that these things might happen, or you can accept that things like this are probably going to happen when you do big things. And you're making an impact, right? The bigger the impact it seems like the greater the risk sometimes of exposure as a business, but also just individually as humans. So that's the thing I don't want - I don't want people to hold back from sharing their best work with the world for fear that someone's going to say that they stole that work from them or vice versa, like have someone steal that work from them and just know like that that's part of doing big things in the world.
DR. JENNIFER: It is. Yeah. I encourage any provider that has knowledge to share and has implemented their work into clinical practice and has seen great things happen, please do bring it forward. Please do bring it forward. God knows your truth. God knows the truth and the wisdom of the work. And with that kind of protection, you don't need to worry, just bring it forward. And if someone decides they want to play a little shenanigans, then you know what? That's on them and not on you.
DR. DANIELLE: You had mentioned that you had stopped practicing midwifery, and I don't actively see chiropractic patients. I haven't been actively practicing for almost three years at this point. And it's still something that some days I'm like, I should be doing that work. And other days I'm like, no, this is actually not where I belong. So I would love for you to kind of share what your journey was like when you decided to stop practicing midwifery and if there's been any time you doubted that decision, too.
DR. JENNIFER: Yeah. So it was a tough decision, but it kind of wasn't either because I waited so long to get married and have children that I stopped taking midwifery clients after my daughter was born. I had had three pregnancy - actually let's see two pregnancy losses. And then my daughter, she was born when I was 37. And I thought, gosh, I just want to spend time with this baby and nurse her and nurture her and care for her.
And so my last home birth was the baby of a chiropractic family. And Claire was six months old at the time, and I'll never forget this beautiful birth of this little girl who is now - how old is she, she's 10. And the day after the baby was born, I brought Claire with me, my daughter, to the one day postpartum. And as I was examining this little new baby, I laid Claire on the bed next to the baby. And I just looked and I thought, this is the end of an era. This is it. I'm not going to deliver any more babies. And I almost was a little teary over it as I am now recalling the story because I can see it so vividly in my head, my daughter laying next to this baby. And this family was very special to me; the dad ended up passing away in 2017 and it was just him and I sitting on the bathroom floor, catching his daughter together. And it was very special. It was the second baby in that family that I had attended as a midwife, but I digress.
The decision was an easy one for me because I had practiced as a homebirth midwife in some capacity at a birth center in El Paso, Texas and at a birth center in Miami, Florida. I was the Director of Midwifery at The Labor of Love Birth Center in Kingston, Jamaica from 2019-2020, because that was Y2K and we were all afraid the power would go off living on an island and we would be stranded - and how silly, right?
I decided that I wasn't going to be up all night anymore and I wasn't going to miss any more Christmases or weddings or holidays or time with my new baby. And so it was the right time - bittersweet, but the right time. And I've been asked by a few different chiropractors, a few different friends, would you attend my birth as my midwife? And that's something I've been kind of pondering back and forth in my head. And I might actually do something like that. But as far as active midwifery practice, it's very tedious and time consuming.
You're on 24 hours a day. I'd come home from a birth, sterilize my instruments, have a shower, maybe have a one hour nap. Maybe I was up for a night or two and then I would get up shower and go to my office and do prenatals and fertility work all day long and then every single day. And then I realized when I became a mom that wasn't going to be possible anymore. So it was the right time. You know when the time comes to say, okay, this part of my practice is finished and now I'm moving into this more permanent place is what it felt like for me when I did the fertility work and the pelvic pain work.
DR. DANIELLE: I actually see a lot of people stay in professions, whether it's chiropractic or something else because they feel obligated to, because we take on a lot of student loan debt, for example, to study and learn what we learn and able to do what we do. I've had it said to me many times, Oh, that's such a shame, you went to school for all those years. And I'm like, yeah, but I couldn't be doing what I do now and making the impact in the way that I do now if I hadn't gone to school to learn to be a chiropractor, and do all of the things that a chiropractor does. So it's just interesting to hear people's perspective and they're honestly limiting beliefs about what it means if you decide to transition, if you decide to move on from a career, that was what it was for the time that it was.
DR. JENNIFER: I agree. I agree with you. I think that while you're a chiropractic physician, you have a multifaceted sort of field where you don't have to be a clinician - you can be a writer, you can be an instructor, you can be a professor, you can do podcasts and teach people how to live their best life and build businesses. And I think bravo to you. And when we have to kind of put to sleep a portion of our practice, it's not because, Oh boy, I did all this training and I should be doing this and should as being the operative word of should, is just full of shame sometimes. And it's not necessary, sometimes it's time to just transition on.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. You hit the nail in the head there. It's full of shame. And that's such a big thing, especially for people that carry a lot of student loan debt, there is so much shame, so much shame and people love to shame other people that have all that student loan debt. It's just like, I don't want to say it is what it is because I don't want to act like it's okay. It's not an okay situation in my opinion. But at the same time, it is what it is. Everyone has a different path and a different journey that they're on.
DR. JENNIFER: That's right. Absolutely.
DR. DANIELLE: So let's wrap this conversation up with a couple more things. So first things first, if there's someone that's listening to the show and she’s wanting to do what you've done in her own way - she's wanting to take these years that she's had clinical experience and seeing the results that she helps people get and teach other people how to do what it is that she's created and the method that she's created, but she's totally freaked out about the idea - what advice would you want to share with her right now?
DR. JENNIFER: I would say just start writing your curriculum, just start writing it and then just tweak it up and see what feels best to you and read it over and over again and see if this is presentable material to present to a group of educated people. Are you feeling like you've covered all bases? Are you getting across the idea of what you want these professionals to implement into their practice? And just do it. I mean, life is far too short to not just implement something. That's a dream of yours or a passion of yours, we want to hear about it, send us all your good stuff. We are always, you know, at least me, I speak for myself, I'm always in the mind of learning. I always want to learn more and there are people there that want to learn from you. So just do it.
DR. DANIELLE: Amen to that. All right. So where is the best place for people to go if they want to learn more about Mercier Therapy and what they might expect to learn?
DR. JENNIFER: Sure. MercierTherapy.com is where I would send somebody if they wanted to learn more about the training. And then my practice website is ExpectAMiracle.life. You got to get the “.life” in there. I did that on purpose because my practice is all about life and creating new life and renewing and restoring life for women and families and couples. If you want to learn more about my work, my second book is about to come out, it's called Conceive. It's with the publisher now, I'm looking at releasing it probably in September. First book is unpublished at this time, you know why? Because the second one will be way better. So just hold on tight for that. But I also produced, wrote, and directed a documentary film on my work. And so you can go to ExpectAMiracle.life and then click on the link to watch the film, and it's on Amazon Prime. It's also with Food Matters TV. You'll have to buy it for $2.99 on Amazon Prime. It may even be free at this point. So I encourage you to watch it. It's called Fertility, The Shared Journey with Mercier Therapy.
DR. DANIELLE: Awesome, that's amazing. Thank you so much for everything that you have shared and just taking the time out of your busy life and work schedule to spread this message.
DR. JENNIFER: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.